A History of Firefox

chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.

Comments

Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

[RobertM1968]

February 06, 2006
Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

The story of Internet Explorer is long but yet lacking in detail or any real value. There are many perspectives. This is mine. IE was of course written by Spry and acquired by us at Microsoft.

Since then, we've added many new bugs (I mean features), security holes (err... features),
stolen and duplicated ideas (umm... innovations). Even more importantly, we added tons of
new code to work around things in the original Spry browser we didn't understand... tons...
and since bigger is better, that alone makes IE7 the best browser on the market.

IE7 keeps Windows users working twice as productively (doing System Restores and removing viruses)
on their machines - what other browser forces (I mean allows) a user to sit in front of their
computers doing (recovery and restore) work?

Such amazing new security ideas like sandbagging (umm.. sandboxing) IE will force IE to write
files and such to only the temp directories (though since so many viruses and spyware already
write themselves there and then execute this is another item our Marketing Department needs
to spin as an improvement).

All in all, our newest browser is bigger, (bloatier), (borrowed and outdated) feature rich and
far more (or less) secure!

Footnotes

      1. Some people claimed we didn't create all the new innovations in IE7 like tabbed browsing,
            but you need to remember that Time is relative. Besides, even though we were the last ones
            to come out with these innovations, our amazing Marketing Team can still convince the world
            we are first - we call it our "Leading the Pack From the Rear" methodology.
      2. "How to Secure & Stabilize your browser(TM)", or "The Mozilla Advantage" as it is more commonly
            known as.
      3. "Module Owners" - Microsoft, Microsoft and only Microsoft - where we "borrowed" the ideas, code
            and technology is irrelevant.
      4. "Moving Target" or "Barely Crawling Target" as we prefer to call it.

Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[CyricZ]

I'm not sure why your post was heavily moderated down. It does address a very serious point: Opera did influence Firefox.

Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).

It's not a bad thing at all that Firefox draws from Opera. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb and Safari innovate; Firefox brings those innovations to the masses.

Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[worb]

Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight. The company has been run by the same people for ten and a half years by now - the founders - and they've had a clear vision. They wanted to bring the web to everyone, to give them choice.

Unlike Mozilla, Opera has always had make money, and that in a situation where they've had less than one per cent of the market. So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts" and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.

That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.

Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.

While the payware, the ads, and so on were necessary to keep the company afloat, it has also hurt Opera. Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign. Firefox's timing was incredible. They released 1.0 when everyone was talking about how dangerous it was to use Internet Explorer.

While Firefox was free as in beer, easy to use, and ready for the masses (more or less), Opera still had to rely on ads, and had to charge for the browser. But they cleaned up the UI, and last year Opera was released for free-as-in-beer.

Some may say "too little too late", but Opera has never been huge. There isn't much of a market share to lose! Opera has a small but loyal following, and it's still smaller, faster, and it has more functionality out of the box than Firefox.

Now that Opera has simplified the UI and removed the ads, it can only grow. It will need proper marketing, though, and it will need to differentiate itself from Firefox and establish an identity which gives people a clear vision of what Opera is about, and why they should use it instead of something else.

Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it, and some were even invented by Opera. But these days Firefox takes all the credit, and that's partly because it can rely on others who have done everything, so it can simply pick and choose from other browsers' innovations. And it can avoid the pitfalls too, because Firefox already made those mistakes back when it was "Netscape". Firefox obviously benefits from being Netscape's "successor". All web designers know about Netscape, after all. So they can't ignore it when designing pages.

Opera has done a lot, but one wouldn't think so just by looking at its market share. It's a pity, really. Opera was the only independent browser, and they put real money into open standards. IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.

Now Firefox has stolen the thunder, partly deserved, partly undeserved. But I think Opera can make it too. They just need to get the marketing right.

Re:Pardon?

[RBAE]

Mozilla? You should've taken a look at NS Communicator's code. Now that was scary. I can tell you many people couldn't believe that thing could actually run without crashing after 5 minutes of us. When we launched beta versions, some of us were freaked out to see that people was actually using them.

But we had a lot of fun :-)

Re:Innacurate

[blakeross]

Hi Berger,

I appreciate the nod. Richter made a similar comment on the post itself. I attempted to respond with the following about an hour ago, but it seems it didn't make it past the moderation filter, so here it is:

"Hi Richster,

I'm not sure either. My post on Firefox Religion from this time last year did mention Ben. But to be fair, Ben's article does begin with a discussion of perspectives :) Sour grapes don't help anything, and like others here, I enjoyed this article as a persuasive essay on why software engineering doesn't have to be as dispassionate as most people think.

I haven't lost interest in Firefox by a long shot, but coding-wise I prefer to work in leaps and bounds in small teams on fledgling products. Firefox no longer fits that profile--which is mostly a good thing! So I've been working with Joe Hewitt (another of the original Firefox guys) on a new project that will complement Firefox.

I think when we release, it will become clear that I never actually strayed too far from the fox. But I also know that the kinds of things we're working on could never be achieved--or achieved quickly enough, at least--if attempted in a project that has grown as large and mature as Firefox. Thus, our new project is in many ways a realization of where I would take Firefox today were it still as pliable (and thus immature) as 2 years ago.

Given that there are only two of us on the project right now, it consumes about all the coding time I can muster...so I allocate my Firefox time on SpreadFirefox and its campaigns, such as our newest, Firefox Flicks.

Thanks,

Blake"

Re:Pardon?

[CyricZ]

Yeah, we've got some memory leaks once in a while, there are many things we could do better, and we don't run in 64K of RAM, but it really isn't a big deal outside of slashdot postings looking for karma, and it really isn't much worse (if at all) than other apps.

Is this seriously your attitude? It's no wonder that Firefox and much of the other software from the Mozilla project is so bloated. Even on systems with 2 GB or more of RAM, it is still a relatively scarce resource, and thus should not be wasted. I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.

Remember, 400 MB for a web browser is still a massive consumption of memory on a 1 or 2 GB system. When there are many regular folks with systems that only have 512 MB of RAM, you start running into serious performance issues (which is often reported to be the case).

You say it's not a big deal to waste memory. Sorry to say it, but you're fucking wrong. Firefox will continually be looked upon as an inferior browser by those with any software development background if such a trend of waste continues.

I hope you understand why I keep coming back to Opera. They've put out a product that's just as portable and just as featureful as Firefox (if not more so). And they manage to do it without consuming hundreds of MB of RAM.